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Apple announced the introduction of app privacy details to their App Store in December 2020, marking the frst ever real-world, large-scale deployment of the privacy nutrition label concept, which had been introduced by researchers over a decade earlier. The Apple labels are created by app developers, who self-report their app’s data practices. In this paper, we present the frst study examining the usability and understandability of Apple’s privacy nutrition label creation process from the developer’s perspective. By observing and interviewing 12 iOS app developers about how they created the privacy label for a real-world app that they developed, we identified common challenges for correctly and efciently creating privacy labels. We discuss design implications both for improving Apple’s privacy label design and for future deployment of other standardized privacy notices.
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Understanding iOS Privacy Nutrition Labels: An Exploratory Large-Scale Analysis of App Store Data
Since December 2020, the Apple App Store has required all developers to create a privacy label when submitting new apps or app updates. However, there has not been a comprehensive study on how developers responded to this requirement. We present the frst measurement study of Apple privacy nutrition labels to understand how apps on the U.S. App Store create and update privacy labels. We collected weekly snapshots of the privacy label and other metadata for all the 1.4 million apps on the U.S. App Store from April 2 to November 5, 2021. Our analysis showed that 51.6% of apps still do not have a privacy label as of November 5, 2021. Although 35.3% of old apps have created a privacy label, only 2.7% of old apps created a privacy label without app updates (i.e., voluntary adoption). Our findings suggest that inactive apps have little incentive to create privacy labels.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1801472
- PAR ID:
- 10399852
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- SIGCHI Conference: Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 7
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Starting December 2020, all new and updated iOS apps must display app-based privacy labels. As the first large-scale implementation of privacy nutrition labels in a real-world setting, we aim to understand how these labels affect perceptions of app behavior. Replicating the methodology of Emani-Naeini et al. (IEEE S&P '21) in the space of IoT privacy nutrition labels, we conducted an online study in January 2023 on Prolific with n=1,505 participants to investigate the impact of privacy labels on users' risk perception and willingness to install apps. We found that many privacy label attributes raise participants' risk perception and lower their willingness to install an app. For example, when the app privacy label indicates that \emph{financial info} will be collected and linked to their identities, participants were 15 times more likely to report increased privacy and security risks associated with the app. Likewise, when a label shows that \emph{sensitive info} will be collected and used for cross-app/website tracking, participants were 304 times more likely to report a decrease in their willingness to install. However, participants had difficulty understanding privacy label jargon such as "diagnostics," "identifiers," "track" and "linked." We provide recommendations for enhancing privacy label transparency, the importance of label clarity and accuracy, and how labels can impact consumer choice when suitable alternative apps are available.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3519739
